Jayd is wearing white in honor of her marriage to her spiritual mother Oshune, but, as she observes in her introductory journal entry, her mind is as much on the mundane as on the divine. An incriminating cell phone picture suggests her boyfriend Jeremy is cheating, and Jayd avoids and fights with Jeremy and swaps choice words with “that broad.” Her friends Mickey, Rah and Nigel, along with the two young children in their care, move in together (“I know it's strange for some of my friends to be parents going into our senior year of high school,” Jayd opines in a refreshingly nonjudgmental aside, “but that's how it is sometimes”), and Jayd is the first to hear when money troubles arise and treacherous exes show up. In the meantime, Jayd's archnemesis Misty is becoming a vampire, a turn of events the author weaves comfortably into the book's voodoo cosmology, and Jayd fights Misty and her kin both in dreams and in the physical world.

Though a few elements seem hastily put together (the same one-liner about the incriminating photo appears twice, for instance), this is a solid installment in Jayd's saga. (discussion guide) (Fiction. 12-16)